Loneliness has been a major concern in America, particularly in the wake of the social isolation imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. But friendships are not in decline in the United States, a new study has found. An American adult has an average of four to five friends, similar to numbers reported in previous research from 1970 to 2015, researchers reported July 30 in the journal PLOS One. Only 2% of people describe themselves as friendless, which also is in line with data from prior years. However, many people say they’d like to spend more time with friends or have higher quality friendships, researchers found. “Americans long for greater closeness with friends; although over 75% were satisfied with the number of friends they had, 42% felt they were not as close to their friends as they would like,” wrote the research team led by Natalie Pennington, an assistant professor of communication studies at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. For the study, researchers surveyed nearly 6,000 American adults about their friendships and well-being, as part of an ongoing multi-year research project. The data showed that people often talk with friends in person, though texting and phone calls are also common. Overall, results show that the ongoing project could shed new light on friendship and well-being, researchers said. For example, they plan to consider the varying definitions…  read on >  read on >

The kids are not alright. New data shows a troubling 8% annual increase in the number of American children ages 8 to 12 who died by suicide, with the sharpest increase seen among girls. Suicide has now become the fifth leading cause of death among both male and female preteens, report a team led by Donna Ruch, of Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. Ruch works at the hospital’s Center for Suicide Prevention and Research. Her team published its findings July 30 in the journal JAMA Network Open. Rising rates of suicides among children have set off alarm bells for experts in recent years. “In 2021, the National Institute of Mental Health convened a research roundtable series to address the rising rates of suicides in preteens, defined as youths aged 8 to 12 years,” Ruch’s group noted. They said that, until now, there’s been little good data on suicides among preteens. To help remedy that, the Ohio group looked at data for 2001 through 2022 from a major federal online database that lists the underlying cause of death for U.S. preteens. Overall, 2,241 preteens are known to have died by suicide during the more than two decades covered by the database. Initially, there was a encouraging downward trend in these deaths between 2001 and 2007, Ruch’s group noted. However, beginning in 2008, that trend reversed.…  read on >  read on >

Three out of five young people who die by suicide don’t have any prior mental health diagnosis, a new study finds. People are missing the telltale signs that children, teens and young adults are troubled in ways that put them at risk for suicide, researchers said. “Our findings point to the critical need to increase equitable access to mental health screening, diagnosis and treatment for all youth,” said researcher Dr. Jennifer Hoffman, an emergency medicine physician with the Children’s Hospital of Chicago. The results also emphasize the need for safe gun storage, given how impulsive young people can be. There had been no signs of mental troubles in 2 of 3 suicides involving a gun, the most common method among young people in this study, researchers found. An estimated 22.6 million U.S. children live in households with firearms, and 4.5 million live in homes where guns are put away loaded in unlocked drawers and cabinets, researchers said. “To reduce the risk of youth suicide by firearms, counseling is needed to encourage parents to store firearms in the home safely. These messages should be delivered in community and school settings, in addition to doctors’ offices,” Hoffmann said in a hospital news release. “Secure storage laws, also known as child-access prevention laws, have also been demonstrated to reduce firearm suicide rates, and more states need to enact…  read on >  read on >

Smokers with diabetes or obesity who take semaglutide (Ozempic/Wegovy) might reap an added benefit: Help in quitting smoking. A yearlong study found that, compared to people using other diabetes drugs, fewer patients who were taking semaglutide sought out medical help to quit smoking. That suggests the drug might have already been helping them to quit, researchers noted. The finding wasn’t a complete surprise to researchers at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), since “clinical anecdotes that patients treated with semaglutide … [have] reported reduced desire to smoke” have already been widespread, they said. The new study was published July 29 in the Annals of Internal Medicine. How might semaglutide cut down on smoking? The researchers noted these drugs (along with Mounjaro and Zepbound) are glucagon-like peptide receptor agonists (GLP-1s), which work to suppress appetite by targeting specific receptors in the brain. Studies in mice have shown that GLP-1s also reduce “nicotine-induced increases in dopamine release” in a specific brain area, “a common mechanism underlying the rewarding effects of addictive drugs,” the researchers explained. The new study was led by NIDA director Dr. Nora Volkow. Her team analyzed data from seven trials, all involving smokers who also had type 2 diabetes. Almost 223,000 patients were tracked for a year, and they took a variety of diabetes meds, including insulin, metformin and sulfonylureas, among others. A…  read on >  read on >